The classicist Mary Beard examines the excesses and tedium of imperial rule, sorting fact from gossip and tall tales. By Jennifer Szalai When you purchase an independently reviewed book through our ...

KING OF PONTUS (208 pp.)—Alfred Duggan—Coward-McCann ($3.95). “Mithridates, he died old,” sang A. E. Housman in A Shropshire Lad—leaving it largely up to his readers to know who Mithradates was and ...

I am told that some people in our TikTok world believe that ancient history is irrelevant. Those folks reckon that a fraught relationship between two vast empires – extinct for many centuries – ...